How December 4th Could Trigger The "Most Violent Economic Shock In History"

It was the one moment that convinced Hitler suicide was better than surrendering.

On the morning of April 29, 1945, the bodies of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and his mistress were dumped like garbage into Milan’s Piazzale Loreto.

A large mob of Italians quickly gathered. They pelted the former leader’s corpse with vegetables. They spat on it. They urinated on it. Some even emptied their pistols into his lifeless body.

After a few hours, the crowd hung the bodies from a metal girder at a nearby gas station for all to see.

The corpse of Benito Mussolini

I walked through Piazzale Loreto during a recent trip to Italy, which is suffering its worst economic downturn since 1945. And I realized that Italians are angrier now than they’ve been since they hung Il Duce up by his heels.

Italy has had no productive growth since 1999. Real GDP per person is smaller than it was at the turn of the century.

That’s almost two decades of economic stagnation. By any measure, the Italian economy is in a deep depression. And things will probably get much worse.

It’s no surprise Italians are in a revolutionary mood...

The Five Star Movement (M5S) is Italy’s new populist political party. It’s anti-globalist, anti-euro, and vehemently anti-establishment. It doesn’t neatly fall into the left–right political paradigm.

M5S has become the most popular political party in Italy. It blames the country’s chronic lack of growth on the euro currency. A large plurality of Italians agrees.

M5S has promised to hold a vote to leave the euro and reinstate Italy’s old currency, the lira, as soon as it’s in power. That could be very soon.

Given the chance, Italians probably would vote to return to the lira. If that happens, it would awaken a monetary volcano.

The Financial Times recently put it this way:

An Italian exit from the single currency would trigger the total collapse of the eurozone within a very short period.

It would probably lead to the most violent economic shock in history, dwarfing the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008 and the 1929 Wall Street crash.

If the FT is even partially right, it means a stock market crash of historic proportions could be imminent. It could devastate anyone with a brokerage account.

Here’s how it could all happen…

On December 4, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s current pro-EU government is holding a referendum on changing Italy’s constitution.

In effect, a “Yes” vote is a vote of approval for Renzi’s government.

A “No” vote is a chance for the average Italian to give the finger to EU bureaucrats in Brussels.

Given the intense anger Italians feel right now, it’s very likely they’ll do just that.

According to the latest polls, the “No” camp has 54% support and all of the momentum. Even prominent members of Renzi’s own party are defecting to the “No” side.

If the December 4 referendum fails, Renzi has promised to resign. Even if he doesn’t, the loss would politically castrate him. In all likelihood his government would collapse. (Italian governments have a short shelf life. There have been 63 since 1945. That’s almost a rate of a new government each year.)

One way or another, M5S will come to power. It’s just a matter of when. If Renzi’s December 4 referendum fails—and it looks like it will—M5S will likely take over within months.

Once it’s in power, M5S will hold a referendum on leaving the euro and returning to the lira. Italians will likely vote to leave.

Italy is the third-largest member of the Eurozone. If it leaves, it will have the psychological effect of yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Other countries—notably France—will quickly head for the exit and return to their national currencies.

Think of the euro as the economic glue holding the EU together. Without it, economic ties weaken, and the whole EU project unravels.

The EU is the world’s largest economy. If it collapses, it would trigger an unprecedented global stock market crash. That’s how important Italy’s December 4 referendum is. It would be the first domino to fall.

The ledger system works only as long as the mouths let it. The hunger for sustenance drives the system. If the fleshly human bodies want a commodity as "the ledger" .... then the ledger becomes a particle instead of a wave.

Frankly it would be wonderful if the EU Imperial Superstate would finally collapse and European Nation states could finally start repairing their economies with their own sovereign currencies. What we need in America is our own nationalist economic policy. A return to sound money is eventually going to happen. Even if Trump starts to print tons of money for his infrastructure program. It will only accelerate the bursting of the debt bubble.

The Brits voted for Brexit, but they are still nowhere near the exit. Face it, the EU is like the Hotel California:

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
'Relax' said the night man
'We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave!

The author of the ZH article has it quite wrong. The truth of the matter is, a "yes" to the referendum would be far more likely to ultimately result in an exit from the Euro than would a "no". Why? because if adopted, the new electoral system would substantially remove current checks and balances. IF five star came to power under the current system, they could not really do much to leave the Euro (apart from the fact that many among five star movt. do not actually want to leave the Euro anyway). IF five star came to power under the amended , new system an exit from the euro would become much easier. In fact, many Italians will vote against renzi's amendments precisely because of that. So suggesting that a rejection of the referendum would increase odds for an Italyexit displays a total lack of understanding of the situation.
Given that, a no-vote may actually lead to a significant rally in european stocks after a possible initial knee-jerk sell-off. Conversely, a yes-vote may lead to short-term relief but eventually to much larger long-term worries. be careful what you wish for.

This is on topic. The forces of entropy that are leading to a dissolution of the old world order are visible everywhere. The 5 star movement is born from the same systemic failures that are driving the divisions in the US.

MLK said that it was moral to disobey an immoral law. That is a high ideal. Taken to its full extent, we once again become a nation of individuals. The mayors of these respective cities are playing to their political base. That is politics. The red counties surrounding the blue city states have for a century or more had to bow to the dictates of the majority residing in the city centers. The taxes, the gun laws, the asset forfeitures, imminent domain and a host of other grievances have been suffered by the minorities living in the red counties dominated by the blue city states. If the city states can disregard federal law, the surrounding counties can ignore state law foisted on them by the city states.

This is devolution. We have reached the maximum point of complexity and now we are devolving into a system that is less complex. The city states are about to disrupt their life support. The riots have just begun.

Brexit was the first snowflake to fall in what is sure to be an avalanche of global proportions. Everyone said Brexit couldn't possibly happen, and then it did. That gave people the most dangerous thing in human psychology - hope. Hope that the impossible could happen. Everything else is a symptom of that hope.

I'm not a psychic. I'm not a beahviour theorist. I don't know all the ins and outs of the currents of history. I was dead certain on a Hillary victory followed closesly by her faked assasination and WW3. I have never been so happy to be wrong. With such recent history, my predictions have an 80% probability of continuing to be wrong. But at any rate, this is the pattern I see, take it as I've presented it with all those grains of salt I have already provided and then a fistful more.

The world economic order will fail. It was designed to do so. The industrialists and bankers who formed this world order (that they stole from the aristocracy in the 18th and 19th centuries) know the play and know that heads must role. Goldman Sachs has been offered up to the masses as the obvious sacrificial "banking elite". Every leader of every government in the Western World (bar only the USA and now the UK) are either former members of Goldman Sachs or have family ties to the bank. They will be presented as "pulling the strings" of the global order to the masses, and it is Goldman Sachs that will find their heads on the choping block as the rest of the global banking elite goes unpunished.

Caught up in the coming crisis will be a war between the West and the Islamic Middle East. Islam will lose, but not without a great blood sacrifice. Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran are being set up as the ultimate victims of this war that will be thrust upon us (not that I really mind at all about those ones). The West will not be unscathed, but it will survive. The United States probably will not. I don't think Trump being president changes that all that much.

Out of the crisis will come a global political organisation, a single global currency and the slogan of "never again" played every five minutes to every person left. It will be presented as a utopia. It will look like a utopia. The people will clamour for it and demand it. It will be the greatest slavery of all.

I don’t see the elites holding this together. You already have nations heading for the exits. Without ever ending inputs of energy and supplies, the city centers cannot hold. The coordination of those inputs is maintained by one of the most complex and energy dependent systems ever designed. We are not Rome. Rome was supplied by oxcart and sailing ships. Its water supply was gravity fed. Its roads were so substantial; bits of them are still in use two thousand years later. Our complex systems can be collapsed with one energy pulse. According to a congressional study on the matter, collapse the grid and we lose 90% of our population within one year. It is estimated that the taking down of nine substations would collapse our power grid. If this is true, nine guys with nine truckloads of fertilizer could put us in the dark ages in a single afternoon.

In it's current cucked state, the West cannot survive without the US. The front lines in any war between the West and Islam will be in...Europe, which has allowed millions of Islamic jihadi not only to set roots there, but the idiots are also PAYING for it. If your scenario plays out (unlikely, but interesting), the US can emerge stronger than ever. A war on the civilization level will allow us to be rid of the traitorous filth that currently holds sway in academia, the media, gov't and multinationals. The source of most of our problems is the enemy within.

I would be not so sure that the 5 stars movement is against euro and the EU. They simply say we should have a referendum on that. But their leaders have already took contacts with the Trllateral Commission to get directives months ago.

The only party who goes tough on euro, quite everyday, is Lega (North League). 5S always talk about corruption & money for everyone but the battle against EU and Euro seems quite forgotten

The middle class is being screwed by the fucking globalists. I am watching Nightline right now and their smarmy attitude is sickening. Great if you work in NYC for a MSM outlet. Horrible if you actually have to pay the fucking bills and deal with fucking endless regulations.

The Club-Med nations always have an over-valued currency destroying their economies.

Let’s see what Richard Werner thinks about the Euro, one of the people that wrote “Where does money come from?”, he understands money.

”When visiting Europe at the time (I was based in Tokyo in the 1990s), and meeting my peers, the chief economists at other banks, I would of course discuss what in my view was the highly worrying prospect of these plans to abolish the D-Mark. I was astonished by their reaction. About half of them insisted that those plans were so lunatic that, of course, they would not be implemented.“

“The other half of the chief economists, like me, recognised that a single currency would be introduced, no matter how nonsensical the economics, since it was a political project. (The economics being bad, the politics was even worse: the end of democracy in Europe). They agreed with me that it was going to be a disaster“

A disaster from the offing, then they made it worse (Richard Werner again):

”in the event the European Central Bank was to exacerbate matters greatly by creating massive credit bubbles, banking crises and recessions in its first decade of operation. The ECB then ensured a prolonged crisis by not ending these banking busts, such as in Ireland, quickly and without costs to the tax payer (as central banks are uniquely able to do). Instead, the ECB forced governments to incur massive national debts to rescue their now defunct banking systems. This way, Ireland moved from fiscal poster boy to virtual default, needing an IMF rescue.“

Communism has a 100% failure rate when the participants are unwilling.

I have no doubt post-collapse many will attempt to force Communism down the throats of most Western Countries in some form or fashion. The trick will be moving to a place that refuses to embrace it and is large enough to defend against it.

I imagine if they brought back some form of cultural/national socialism without the cultural and ethnic suicide that goes along with it at the moment, their support would be overwhelming ... post-collapse.

Marx was an idiot. One does not engage in a transaction by swapping equally valued goods, but rather swapping less valuable goods for more valuable goods. First error I caught when reading Das Kapital. Page 4.

And while he proposed a beautiful adage "From each according to his ability to each arroding to his need" he failed to answer the based question that follows ... "Yes, but how?"

See, I have no doubt you truly believe what you say, the only problem is Communism, according to its creator, is the communal ownership of the means of production.

Communal ownership of the factories, the land, but the reason behind its complete failure is the communal ownership of labor. E.g., you are no longer the sole owner of your labor. What this pragmatically means is that there are no prices as everything is communally owned. Everything is free, including your labor.

Due to obvious failings, this has never been successful in a group of larger than a few dozen. It normally turns into Socialism quite quickly where the government owns the means of production and apportions resources based upon perceived "need."

Unfortunately due to the human condition individuals quickly begin doing the "bare minimum" of what is required of them. Its why excelling in socialist countries (excelling meaning attaining more goods and resources in your personal possession) have problems with innovation and suffer constantly from shortages.

Until you can plug some pretty basic holes in Socialist market theory I am not going to be reading anyones books on the topic.

Sometimes as a experiment I ask people what is the function of production.

Almost all exposed to a usury based economy would declare that the function of production is to make money.

When you export real raw or finished product you lose industrial energy in return for money tokens.

The real purpose of production is consumption, end of.

A mercantile export economy is always I repeat always a colony.

It's perhaps easier for me to understand at a gut level as I was exposed to the last vestige of a,albeit highly corrupted peasant economy ( corrupted by mercantalism) before it was finally destroyed by the EEC.

I have also walked parts of Europe which were considered borderlands between the then new Westphalian constructs of the 1600s